March 13, 2011

Here’s the log5 analysis of the NCAA tournament field. The first list is the entire field grouped together, and then each region follows. Some random notes…

– Last season, we gave Duke the best chance of winning the tournament. This is far different from saying we successfully predicted Duke would win the tournament. We did no such thing. This season, Ohio State has the best chance to win it all, and if I had to endorse one team to win it, it would be the Buckeyes. That said, it’s much safer to say that Ohio State won’t win it. Whoever does take the title will need to play very well and also get some good fortune in events outside of their control.

– I’m not terribly confident about the probabilities for Utah State and Belmont. I’m confident they are seeded undeservingly low, but by how much is very difficult to say. Maybe the NCAA will seriously study situations like these someday and we can remove the scheduling issue from the selection process.

– As with the conference tournament projections, I’m using an exponent of 11 to determine these probabilities. If that means nothing to you, don’t worry about it.

The numbers in each table represent the chance in percent of a team advancing to the round in question.